# Margarine Rules!



## boonedoggle (Jun 23, 2006)

No references for this, but my brother sent it to me...so it must be true!:ss



Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter. How do you like it? They have come out with some clever new flavorings. 

DO YOU KNOW.. the difference between margarine and butter? 

Read on to the end...gets very interesting! 

Both have the same amount of calories. 

Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams compared to 5 grams. 

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study. 

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods. 

Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few 
only because they are added! 

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods. 

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years. 

And now, for Margarine.. 

Very high in trans fatty acids. 

Triple risk of coronary heart disease. 
Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol) 

Increases the risk of cancers up to five fold. 

Lowers quality of breast milk. 

Decreases immune response. 

Decreases insulin response. 

And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING! 

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC.. 


You can try this yourself: 

Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will note a couple of things: 

* no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something) 

* it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?


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## Mark C (Sep 19, 2007)

Interesting. So what exactly IS margarine?

I'm a butter user, gotta be unsalted though. Partly cause it just tastes better, and partly because it's a more natural ingredient. I'm not a fan of manufactured food.


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## RenoB (Oct 12, 2005)

This must be one of those urban legends. My wife came home a couple weeks ago with a similar story of how margarine was developed as rat poison but the rats wouldn't eat it. So they added yellow coloring and sold it to us.

Needless to say, we switched to all butter :r I wonder if this was put out there by dairy marketers?!?!


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## zonedar (Aug 2, 2006)

boonedoggle said:


> And here's the most disturbing fact.... HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!


Every time I hear this legend I can't help but think that water (H20) is one ATOM away from being Hydrogen Peroxide (H202). Hydrogen Peroxide, as well as a household disinfectant and bleaching agent is used in high concentrations as an oxidizer for liquid fuel rocket.

Of course the corn liquor my buddy makes could be the fuel itself and I've consumed it...


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## Mark C (Sep 19, 2007)

zonedar said:


> Every time I hear this legend I can't help but think that water (H20) is one ATOM away from being Hydrogen Peroxide (H202). Hydrogen Peroxide, as well as a household disinfectant and bleaching agent is used in high concentrations as an oxidizer for liquid fuel rocket.
> 
> Of course the corn liquor my buddy makes could be the fuel itself and I've consumed it...


Don't forget all the nasty warnings about dihydrogen oxide.

These links satisfied my curiosity, now I know more about margarine than I ever wanted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/margarine.html


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## AAlmeter (Dec 31, 1999)

Where's that tweed wearing food guy from VA when you need him?


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## DUCK (Jul 10, 2007)

KASR and I are butter users... You taste the differnce! We have tried "I can't believe it is not butter" and yes you can tell the difference!

~DUCK


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## nortmand (Jul 28, 2006)

Margarine is pretty much just "light shortening" with salt and artificial butter flavor. Whipped, chemically treated vegetable oil in most cases. As far as being one molecule away from plastic, that is just ridiculous. First, there are many types of plastic with different molecular structures. Second, plastic is primarily carbon (dino juice), just like everything we eat. 
I refuse to eat margarine, but only because butter is a far more traditional, natural product and it tastes better, whereas margarine is the product of a far more complicated industrial product and tastes like artificial butter. Let's put it this way. You can make butter in your kitchen. Good luck making margarine. As far as health issues go, margarine has some advantages over butter and vice versa. Just practice moderation and you are all set.
But seriously, if you use margarine, you suffer from a complete lack of taste and appreciation for food.


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## Ace$nyper (Aug 15, 2007)

I remember reading this as a kid, ever since that I won't get near that stuff.

Real butter tastes alot better to me anyway


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## SUOrangeGuy (Feb 22, 2006)

According to my bio professor margarine was invented as a possible way to fight heart disease. Scientists noticed that Mediterranean countries ate the most fat in the world but did not have high incidences of heart disease. This is because they eat heart healthy non-saturated oils. Scientists created butter flavored versions of these oils but they were not widely accepted because like all non-saturated fats they are liquid at room temp. Us Americans want to watch our butter melt over the potatoes not spritz them. So they decided to partially-saturate the fats using a process call hydrogenation. You bubble hydrogen through the oil at high temperatures. The result increases the Van der Waals forces in the fat and BAM they are solid at room temps. This also is how you make trans fats (A twist forms in the fat molecule that doesn't exist in nature. This is why trans fats are so dangerous because when children eat them their bodies try to make proteins from these unnatural fats and the resultant protein doesn't work. High increases in many childhood illnesses may be because of trans fats. Their not good for adults either but are most dangerous to kids.) You then flavor the oil and die it yellow and you have margarine. The problem is it turns out this hydrogenation process removes the health benefits of eating non-saturated fats but adds many negatives.

There are many different new butter substitutes that use different techniques but the product is the same. Some now have the trans fats removed, etc... still not better than butter.

As far as the plastics go all fats are molecularly very similar to plastic. This is why plastic bowls can stain so easily when foods with fat are placed in them. The fat bonds with the plastic and some of the dyes are fat soluble so they stay too. As for one molecule away... learn the terminology because plastic and fats are each only one molecule. The dyes and flavorings are others but that is incidental.

Don't eat margarine.


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## JAK (Oct 10, 2007)

boonedoggle said:


> * it does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny microorganisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic. Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?


The reason that vegetable oils will go rancid, whereas hydoginated oils will not, is that polyunsaturated oils can undergo autoxidation in the presence of free radicals. Fats that are not polyunsaturated cannot undergo this process.

Also, I can't think of any plastics that margarine would come even close to resembling, although if anyone knows of one please correct me. Margarine, like any fat, is still a triacylglycerol, the only difference is that one double bond is in the trans configuration instead of the cis configuration in some of the fatty acids. Plastics are one, straight polymer.

SU: I don't understand what you mean by children's bodies try to make proteins from trans fats. The monomer proteins are composed of is amino acids. Fatty acids, of any sort, are not turned into proteins.


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## SUOrangeGuy (Feb 22, 2006)

That was a typo from going too fast. I meant many macromolecules our bodies make that contain fats, proteins, etc. Also phospholipids for cellular membranes. Sorry.

I also should correct that when I said trans fats don't exist in nature I meant in plant based oils. Animal fats we consume can contain a very small percentage of trans fat naturally but no where near the amount from hydrogenation.


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## paperairplane (Nov 8, 2007)

There is only one thing I will contribute to a margarine thread, as it is the only time I ever consider this garbage: my nonie calls it oleo.


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## SeanGAR (Jul 9, 2004)

There is so much misinformation in this thread that i don't know where to start. First let me say that I don't buy or use margarine, I use butter. Tastes better and is natural .. thats good enough for me.

Margarine was invented as a way to replace butter .. pure and simple. Fatten turkeys? no. Rat poison? no. Butter was in short supply when Napoleon III offered a prize to invent a replacement in the mid 1800s (he wanted happy people and fat for his army, to keep them strong). Hippolyte Mege-Mouries invented margarine in 1869, winning the prize. He basically fractionated beef tallow and mixed with flavorings.

Separately, Normann, invented hydrogenation which adds hydrogens to double bonds using hydrogen gas and a catalyst. No catalyst = no hydrogenation. Some catalysts are more selective than others .. meaning some produce more trans than others do. Van der waals forces have nothing to do with this. This allowed making plastic fats from liquid oils (instead of more expensive tallow). Here we speak of plasticity as a description of its rheological properties, not chemical properties. The description of margarine as being close to a plastic is pretty funny. It is a plastic .. it is a plastic fat. Petrochemical plastics are obviously different.

They first made margarine from tallow fractionation prior to invention of hydrogenation. Hydrogenation can (and usually does) lead to high trans content .. the reasons why we saw high trans in foods over the past number of years or so is because there was no need to label them and for most products, you are going to have high trans or high saturates .. but saturates have to appear on the label. So the high trans product looked liked it has low saturated fat levels.

An interesting take on trans by one of the few who spoke up 25 years ago questioning their safety. I talked to her a few years ago after we published some data on trans fatty acids in infant formulas .. interesting lady.

http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.html


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